CADET, JOSEPH-MICHEL, merchant butcher, businessman, and purveyor general to the French forces in Canada; b. 24 Dec. 1719 at Quebec, son of François-Joseph Cadet (Caddé), a merchant butcher, and Marie-Joseph Daveine (Davesne, Davenne); his paternal grandfather was a merchant butcher of Quebec and his great-grandfather was also one in Niort, France; d. 31 Jan. 1781 in Paris, France.

When Joseph-Michel Cadet was only four years old his widowed mother on 29 Nov. 1724 married Pierre-Joseph Bernard, a son of one of Maurepas’s secretaries and himself a scrivener in the Marine department, and a few years later she followed her husband to Rochefort leaving Cadet, aged 12, to fend for himself, or so he later declared. At first he stayed with his maternal grandfather, Gabriel Daveine, with whom he afterwards recalled studying mathematics. He evidently had little formal education, for his letters are composed of more colloquial expressions and phonetic spelling than were usual for merchants and their clerks at the time, and in September 1732, before he was 13, he joined the crew of a merchant ship for a voyage to Île Saint-Jean (Prince Edward Island) and then went to work buying cattle for Augustin Cadet, his father’s half-brother, a Quebec butcher.

Cadet’s family relationships are worth recording to show the milieu in which he got his start as a Quebec businessman. His uncle, Michel-François Cadet, Augustin’s brother, kept a shop at Quebec dealing in imported French fabrics at one time, but he was also a butcher like the rest of the family. Cadet’s father’s sister, Marie-Anne Cadet, married a master locksmith, Pierre Amiot, in 1714 and their son, Cadet’s first cousin, Jean-Baptiste Amiot*, became a successful importing merchant acting as the colonial agent of several French shipping merchants during the 1740s and 1750s. Another first cousin, Louise Cadet, Augustin’s daughter, in 1755 married a Huguenot merchant, Joseph Rouffio*, member of a business family of Montauban. The two uncles, Pierre Amiot and Augustin Cadet, were among the seven witnesses at Cadet’s marriage on 10 Sept. 1742 to Angélique Fortier, daughter of Michel, a Montreal businessman. Another witness was a certain “Monsieur Duburon,” probably Jean-Joseph Feré Duburon, an officer in the colonial regulars, whose daughter, Louise-Élisabeth, in 1738 married Denis Goguet, a La Rochelle merchant living at Quebec. After Goguet returned to La Rochelle, Cadet was one of the many Canadians who did business with him and in 1763 Goguet held over 323,000 livres in bills belonging to Cadet. Whether Cadet benefited by his mother’s marriage to a scrivener in the Marine who died at Rochefort about 1737 as provost marshal, or by his sister Marie-Joseph’s marriage (8 Sept. 1749) to a surgeon, Jean-Raymond Vignau, is not clear. His other relationships are enough to explain how he became a successful merchant butcher.

These relationships do not, however, account for Cadet’s astonishing career as the last purveyor general to the French forces in Canada and a rich and powerful businessman. That career can only be explained by his ability to seize opportunities afforded by the two mid-century wars which brought more and more French troops to Canada. Throughout the history of France, and indeed of most countries, vast fortunes have been made supplying the armed forces in wartime. The Bourbon governments contracted out the supplying business to syndicates of businessmen whose histories have not yet been written, and the general context of Cadet’s career is not well understood. It is helpful to remember, however, that while he was making a business of army victualling in Canada many other men of a similar type were victualling other forces in the French empire. For example, under the name of Nicolas Perny, a front man, 13 French businessmen formed a company of purveyors general to the ministry of Marine and Colonies for six years beginning on 1 Jan. 1757. Among them were figures such as Pierre Escourre of Bordeaux, son of a mayor of Tournon, who also invested in slaving ventures to Angola, in the company supplying French army hospitals and other similar enterprises, and who married the daughter of a purveyor general to the navy at Martinique, Laurens-Alexandre Dahon. Other such men contracted to supply the navy with timber, cannon, anchors, and clothing. All had their fingers in many pies. This is the context in which Cadet’s career must be studied for it makes little sense in the national history of Canada. In France there were hundreds of similar businessmen who failed in some cases, grew rich in others, or had ups and downs but managed, like Cadet, to marry their daughters into families of the minor nobility. Françoise Cadet married François Esprit de Vantelon, son of a king’s councillor in the fiscal subdivision of Châtellerault, mayor and captain general of Châtellerault; Angélique Cadet married Jérôme Rossay, seigneur of Les Pallus, officer of the Duc d’Orléans, municipal magistrate and militia captain of Châtellerault; one of Cadet’s sons called himself by the sonorous name of Joseph Cadet Deschamps, seigneur of Mondon. How did their father, a mere colonial butcher, make all this possible?

According to what Cadet declared in 1761 during his interrogations in the Bastille, he had worked during the late 1730s for the official purveyor of meat to the crown at Quebec, Romain Dolbec, and had soon become an equal partner. In 1745, during the War of the Austrian Succession, he was asked by the intendant, Gilles Hocquart, to provide all the meat required by the crown and continued to do so until 1756. This activity was very profitable. Meanwhile he carried on with his own butchering business for a few years, but also ventured into other commodities, milling flour and selling it to ships’ captains, buying ships’ cargoes and re-selling them, and dealing in fish, fur, and general shipping. During the early 1750s he contracted with Michel Mahiet, Antoine Morin, Louis Michaud, and others to go out and gather the fish and fur at posts on the fief of Les Monts-Louis to which he had acquired the rights. He began to buy boats and even ships. In 1752, for instance, he and a partner, Nicolas Massot, sent a ship of about 140 tons, the Joseph de Québec, under Captain Maurice Simonin, to Martinique with a cargo of fish, timber, and oil to be sold and exchanged for a cargo of sugar for the port of Bordeaux. At Bordeaux the ship was fitted out for the journey to Louisbourg, Île Royale (Cape Breton Island), and Quebec in summer 1753 by Pierre Desclaux using a bottomry loan of 11,000 livres from David Gradis et Fils at 12 per cent interest. As Cadet acknowledged and as the busy files of his principal notary, Jean-Claude Panet, show, the War of the Austrian Succession gave Cadet profits and opportunities enough to become a general entrepreneur in the expansive post-war period. He imported large quantities of wine, brandy, and general merchandise from France, particularly in association with Barthélemy* and Jean-Baptiste-Tropez Martin and, in 1759, with Pierre Delannes and Jean-Jacques Gautier and a controller of the Marine, Jean de Villers.

The most successful businessmen in the French empire, then as always, were those who could do business with the government and obtain such official influence, offices, titles, privileges, honours, and mates for their children as money could buy. As early as 1754 Cadet wrote to the minister of Marine and Colonies offering to sign a contract as purveyor general to the crown in Canada; that is, to provision the royal stores at Quebec, Trois-Rivières, Montreal, and the outposts. He got no reply. Then, some time during the summer in 1755, he mentioned the proposal to an army officer with many business interests, Michel-Jean-Hugues Péan, adjutant at Quebec, who aroused the interest and support of the intendant, François Bigot. In October Bigot wrote to Versailles about Cadet’s proposal and in July 1756 received the minister’s permission to sign a contract for nine years beginning on 1 Jan. 1757. Cadet thus assumed responsibility for Canadian supplies that had hitherto been provided partly by smaller colonial contractors and partly by the French company of purveyors general working under the name of Claude Fort, whose contract expired on 31 Dec. 1756. Forty-two articles were drawn up in an official contract which Cadet and the intendant signed on 26 Oct. 1756.

Under the terms of this contract, Cadet was to give each soldier in the field a daily ration of two pounds of bread, a quarter of a pound of dried peas, and either a pound of beef or half a pound of bacon; and failing these rations he was to give cash instead. Soldiers in the town garrisons were to have one and one-half pounds of bread and a quarter of a pound each of dried peas and bacon. In winter, when fighting was usually suspended, Cadet normally paid the equivalent of these rations to the householders on whom the soldiers were quartered, and the rates were to be fixed by the intendant. This official contract concealed some secret contracts by which various officials and others were associated with the supply business. In the same month, October 1756, Cadet signed an agreement sous seing privé (binding but not recorded in notarial minutes) giving Péan a three-fifths share in the business, including one-fifth each for Intendant Bigot, Governor Vaudreuil [Rigaud], and himself, or so Péan said, and he urged Cadet to keep this arrangement secret. About the same time, Cadet conceded another fifth share to be divided equally among three assistants: Jean Corpron*, who kept the books at Quebec, and François Maurin* and Louis Pennisseaut, who together managed a store at Montreal for supplying foodstuffs there and at the forts and posts beyond. This left Cadet with only one-fifth of the profits, but he recovered another fifth in spring 1759 when the aforementioned assistants withdrew from the association. Besides, he did not now lack opportunities for profitable contracts on the side. During 1757 and 1758 he was invited to supply Acadia and did so in association with Bigot’s secretary, Joseph Brassard Deschenaux, and an army captain, Charles Deschamps de Boishébert.

Joseph-Michel Cadet was now enmeshed in one of those dubious mixtures of private and public enterprise so characteristic of Bourbon France, and how it ramified may be seen in glimpses of the lives of his associates. From 1 July 1755 to 11 June 1756, Pennisseaut and Péan were in a joint-stock trading company with the receiver general of finances for La Rochelle, Gratien Drouilhet, and the government storekeeper at Quebec, Pierre Claverie*. Claverie, through his mother, Jeanne La Barthe, was first cousin to the government storekeeper at Montreal, Jean-Pierre La Barthe, who on 30 Oct. 1759 formed a business company with Pennisseaut and Pennisseaut’s relatives, Jacques-Joseph and Jean-Baptiste Lemoine Despins of Montreal. François Maurin had meanwhile been in business with his brother-in-law, Pierre Landriève Lamouline, a chief scrivener for the Marine at Montreal, and we know, too, that Maurin was a cousin of several Huguenot merchants at Quebec, including Pierre Glemet and Jean-Mathieu and François* Mounier, most of whom came from his own birth-place, Jarnac, on the Charente. Some of these, like Cadet himself, made large sums of money in the supply business during the Seven Years’ War.

Cadet distinguished himself from the rest, however, by his heroic efforts to supply the colony with his own fleet of merchant ships not only in 1757 and 1758 but also in 1759 when most French shipping on the Atlantic had been stopped by the British navy and privateers. A full list of Cadet’s ships would be difficult to establish because his shipping agents, especially Pierre Desclaux at Bordeaux and François Gazan and Joseph Aliés at La Rochelle, dispatched many consignments of goods to him in other men’s ships. At one time or another during the three critical years, however, he bought more than two dozen ships in France and Canada, most of them late in 1758 when it was clear that no cargo space was to be had at any price for sending goods to Quebec the next spring. Many of the ships’ officers and seamen were Canadian, a forgotten group in Quebec history: men such as Captain Jean Carbonnel of the Venus (200 tons), Captain Michel Voyer of the Amitié (130 tons), and Captain Joseph Massot, Second Officer André de Lange, and most of the 17-man crew of the Magdeleine (92 tons), a schooner which Cadet bought for 4,000 livres in May 1756 and lost to the enemy in April 1757. Perhaps half of Cadet’s ships were wrecked or captured, but many others arrived safely at Quebec, notably a fleet of almost 20 ships under Jacques Kanon* in May 1759. As Governor Vaudreuil wrote to Versailles on 7 Nov. 1759, “It is because of the help he [Cadet] had brought from France that the colony was saved for the king.” We need not pretend that Cadet was entirely disinterested in order to appreciate the vigour, scale, daring, and success of his campaign to feed the starving colony.

The French government never acknowledged Cadet’s achievements for at least three reasons, none of them worthy of a great nation. First, Cadet was more successful than the French navy in maintaining the transatlantic links on which so much depended. The French fleet was defeated again and again and soon abandoned normal patrolling of the imperial sea routes and even the French coasts in favour of the perennial project for invading England with a fleet of troop ships which, in this case, was destroyed at the Baie de Quiberon by Admiral Edward Hawke on 20 Nov. 1759. The ships would have been better employed in convoying merchant and troop ships, but the French authorities seemed incapable of organizing a convoy as efficient as Cadet’s. Even the repatriation of the French officials and refugees after 1759 was largely done by British vessels. Mortified by its own failures, the French government was not in a frame of mind to recognize Cadet’s successes. Secondly, once Quebec had been lost in September 1759 it was easy to ignore or to disparage Cadet’s efforts to supply the colony and politically necessary to find scapegoats who could be blamed for the losses and failures. Cadet and other officials were natural scapegoats for the loss of Canada just as Jean Laborde was for the loss of Louisbourg and the Comte de Lally and Joseph-François Dupleix were for the loss of French India, because they had made handsome profits in the ill-fated colonies. Here is a third reason why Cadet’s achievements were not properly appreciated: he had garnered a fortune reckoned at several millions. The money was in property and bills of exchange and treasury notes deposited with Denis Goguet at La Rochelle; Barthélemy and Jean-Baptiste-Tropez Martin at Marseilles; Lanogenu and the firm of Veuve Courrejolles at Bayonne; and Pierre Desclaux, Jean-André Lamaletie, and Jean Dupuy Fils et Cie at Bordeaux; and when Cadet could do nothing more in Canada he went to France to settle his many debts and make the most of his fortune. Taken off at Quebec on a British ship, the Adventure, on 18 Oct. 1760, he landed at Brest on 26 November, reached Bordeaux 12 days later, where his family had been living since 1759, and arrived in Paris on 21 Jan. 1761; he was arrested four days later and imprisoned in the Bastille with most of his official colleagues from Canada.

Historians who take the ensuing trial at its face value have no difficulty in pronouncing Joseph-Michel Cadet, as the Châtelet criminal court did on 10 Dec. 1763, a monstrous criminal fortunate to get off with banishment from Paris for nine years and what amounted to a fine of six million livres. To make a national hero of Cadet would be uphill work as there are signs that in 1759 he was in close contact with the enemy for some dark purpose. He was never tried for that, however, and various facts and circumstances show that his case was not so simple as the Châtelet made it seem. Not all observers in Canada thought him a criminal. “I believe him to be the least guilty of all,” wrote a prominent merchant, Francois Havy*, on hearing of Cadet’s arrest, “for he was only a tool that others made use of and he will perhaps be the only victim.” The crown itself seemed to betray doubts when on 5 March 1764 it lifted Cadet’s banishment and decided to release him from the Bastille and to reduce his fine by half. Whatever the significance of those decisions, French criminal justice was notoriously unfair to the accused and otherwise deficient, as many enlightened observers pointed out in that age, and it was not for nothing that the revolutionary governments abolished the Châtelet and made the taking of the Bastille on 14 July 1789 a symbol of victory over a tyrannical and backward régime. More to the point, the prosecuting ministers and magistrates made Cadet’s crimes seem worse than they were by blaming him not only for selling food to the crown at high prices but also for the high prices themselves.

Cadet was faced with a typical 18th-century misunderstanding of the market mechanism which he in his commonsense way seemed to grasp clearly. He said that he “could not conceal that expenditures for the king in Canada were immense, [but] that the cause for this could only be attributed to the scarcity of goods,” and goods were scarce because too few ships reached Quebec. This in turn was because “the dangers that ships and vessels faced in their freighting from France to Canada were not imaginary.” In this matter the evidence seems to be on Cadet’s side. Shipping insurance premiums rose from less than five per cent of the value insured in 1755 to 50 per cent or more in 1758; in 1759 insurance was often unobtainable. Freight rates to Quebec paid in France rose from 190 livres a ton in 1756 to from 240 to 280 livres in 1757; but for guaranteed delivery at Quebec in 1758 and 1759 freight rates were anything from 400 to 1,000 livres a ton when cargo space could be rented at all. The crown, in its infinite wisdom, took the view, on the advice of the Commission Fontanieu set up in 1758 to reduce naval debts [see Alexandre-Robert Hillaire de La Rochette], that anything charged above the 1756 rate of 190 livres was inadmissible profiteering and summarily reduced the claims of shipping merchants to that figure. The crown adopted the same principle when it explained the high wartime prices in Canada as the result of a conspiracy for which Cadet was partly to blame, and yet it now seems plain that whatever Cadet may have done, wartime conditions alone were enough to explain why food prices rose. The trial of Cadet and his associates led the general public to believe that they were particularly self-seeking, corrupt, and unscrupulous, whereas a little investigation shows that they were only doing what many other Bourbon officials did, especially in the colonies, but they had the misfortune to find unusually profitable circumstances in a colony that was subsequently lost to an enemy in wartime. The Bourbon monarchy was accustomed to reducing its short-term debts periodically by means of a chambre de justice which tried anyone suspected of profiteering at government expense, and the infamous affaire du Canada was carried out in that tradition.

Cadet’s case went on for many years while various crown agencies set up to recover the money those involved in the affaire du Canada were condemned to pay slowly discovered that six million livres was too much to ask for. A commission established by a ruling of the Conseil d’État, 31 Dec. 1763, decided a year later that Cadet’s debts amounted to the staggering figure of about seventeen million livres, of which about nine million was owing to the crown, but by 27 Nov. 1767 they had reduced the latter to 3,898,036 livres, which he duly paid by 20 Aug. 1768, although this was a higher figure than the royal controller for the recovery of crown assets, Pierre-François Boucher, arrived at. In the course of the investigation Cadet was imprisoned and interrogated once more from 17 February to 25 March 1766. At his death he was still compiling accounts which he hoped to render to the crown to justify himself. He had no intention, however, of paying out any more than he had to and at his death had still not satisfied his private creditors, who had formed a union in the manner of the age and elected directors who included Tourton et Baur, the well-known Paris bankers, Jean-Baptiste-Tropez Martin, a merchant formerly of Quebec but originally from Marseilles, and Arnoult, a former Paris notary. Cadet had, however, settled some of his debts, having paid 61,583 livres to his main Bordeaux agent, Pierre Desclaux, on 11 Jan. 1768; 52,856 livres to his old personal assistant, Étienne Cebet, on 23 April 1767; and so on as recorded in the files of his principal Paris notary, Maître Delage.

During the 1760s Cadet also sold off the property he owned in Canada, including a lot on the Rue Saint-Pierre, Quebec, measuring 120 feet by 90 feet (whereon had once stood a house built by a Mme Cugnet), which he sold for 22,500 livres to William Grant*, who visited him in Paris for this purpose; three other houses in Quebec, one ruined and one that was still standing on the old Rue Saint-Paul until the early 1970s; two pieces of land on the Rivière Saint-Charles about a league from Quebec; and his seigneury, Les Monts-Louis, on the St Lawrence River about 90 leagues below Quebec. Most of this property was sold for him either by his Quebec notary, Panet, or by his old friend and assistant, Antoine-Pierre Houdin, then at Quebec.

During the last 15 years of his life, Cadet used his remaining assets and his credit to build up what we might now call a trust and real-estate business in France. He bought, sold, and managed large properties. For example, in January 1767 he bought the seigneury of Barbelinière in the parish of Thuré (dept of Vienne) through an intermediary who hid Cadet’s identity, and several other estates “consisting of ancient castles partly demolished, share-croppers’ houses, farms, water-mills, forests, arable lands, meadows, vineyards, thatched cottages, feudal dues . . . in Poitou, Maine and Touraine.” Like many other dealers and speculators in France, he lived partly in Paris or its suburbs where his business was done – and where he eventually died in the Hôtel Sainte-Avoye, in the parish of Saint-Nicolas-des-Champs – and partly on one of his estates near Blois in the valley of the Loire.

No lovelier part of the world is to be found than this, the land of French princely châteaux and of the Très riches heures du duc de Berry, but Cadet and his wife, two middle-aged Canadians in exile, missed the remembered things of home. On 5 May 1766, Cadet wrote to Houdin in Quebec to send him two birch-bark canoes, a Canadian carriage and harness, some ploughs and some axes, and “an honest habitant youth from the Côte de Beaupré or the Île d’Orléans; a good farmer and enterprising at this work.” Cadet offered a nine-year contract at 200 livres a year. “This man is to work my land,” he wrote. “I will have great satisfaction in seeing people from my native land there. But remember I want a bachelor and a first-rate farmer.” So Cadet lived on comfortably, though never very wealthy, until he died on 31 Jan. 1781; his wife died on 1 Oct. 1791. His partners in the supply business at Quebec had dispersed soon after being released from the Bastille in the early 1760s, Corpron to Nantes where he established himself as a shipping merchant, Maurin to Bordeaux where in 1770 he was described as a resident of the city living in the Place Saint-Domingue. Pennisseaut we have not been able to trace.

Joseph-Michel Cadet’s career was spectacular, but he was by no means alone in rising from humble origins to the splendours of a country estate. Jacques Imbert*, the Marine treasurers’ agent at Quebec, whom Cadet must have known well, was born on 15 Nov. 1710 to a Montargis merchant tanner, later turned corporal in the mounted constabulary, who had married a surgeon’s daughter, and after many years in Canada, where he married a Canadian girl, Imbert died a country gentleman at his château near Auxerre, having married off his only daughter, Catherine-Agathe (born at Quebec) to a royal magistrate there. The lives of Jacques-Michel Bréard, controller of the Marine at Quebec, and various merchants such as Denis Goguet, Michel Rodrigue, and Jean-Mathieu Mounier were marked by similar success. “It is a popular conviction,” wrote another biographer of Cadet, Adam Shortt*, half a century ago, “that private profit and public benefit cannot possibly coincide.” Shortt, reflecting on Cadet’s career, did not share that conviction and why should we? After all, if France had not lost Canada, Joseph-Michel Cadet might have been acclaimed as a hero and a public benefactor!

We acknowledge the support of the Government of Canada through the Department of Canadian Heritage. Nous reconnaissons l’appui du gouvernement du Canada par l’entremise du ministère du Patrimoine canadien.